High Sierra Topix

Bandwidth is also an issue. But fortunately, our hosting service assesses that on a monthly average by year. Summer months, of course, are much more active. But as many of you know, winter months can be pretty quiet, which to this point has balanced things out just enough for us. However, I have no idea if increasing the upload file size limits will raise red flags with the host. We're on shared hosting where I have several sites on the same account. Two sites, which have since been removed, were heavy with media and when I uploaded them all at once we were forced into a hosting tier that costed $150/mo vs. the $18.95 we currently pay. The other sites don't even present a blip on the radar so for now they're still on there.

I'm always transparent in what we bring in to this site in the form of ad revenue vs. outgoing expenses. If anyone is interested in the details, I'm happy to share, but here are the basics. Maintaining the cheaper hosting option I've been able to acquire a reasonable reserve of about $2,500 for future development that's stored in a separate savings bank account. Everything incoming tied to this site goes into that account. Domain registration, hosting and time upgrading and maintaining this site have always been separate from that account, out of pocket for me and also covered by volunteer work from the likes of kind folks like @copeg, @maverick and @markskor (among others) - unless something big comes up like the need for a major upgrade in site version and/or hosting.

My hope is that we can build up enough of a reserve to fund some of the many great upgrade ideas you all have submitted over the years. I'd rather do much of it all at once, rather than nickle and dime it.

Anytime you want to put that donation page back up, I'm in..

Yes, I have been confused as there was once a donation option and now I can't find one.

Regarding photos, even with an iphone you can do something as simple as send yourself text messages with multiple images and select a smaller size when you do it, and then you can send them back via email for use on a computer or use them directly from your image library. Pretty fast and easy.

I struggle with the direct donation option. It's such a distraction and seems such a blatant ask from mostly good people whom contribute here and make this site what it is. With AdSense (Google ads) and the direct product linking it feels more natural having people ignore if they want, click on and purchase what they want at the same price, and then we get a piece of that at no cost to them. I've always tried to minimize distractions from dialog here. Also when registered and logged in, I've made it so you see less than half of the ads non-registered visitors see. To me, people whom don't take the time to register and post, and gleam from your knowledge should be the ones shouldering the lion's share of the cost of this place.

Analytics show that 2/3 of our ad revenue comes from non-registered members. Even indirectly, I feel they're the ones that need to pay. Many of them rape this site for intel and then a subset of that re-publishes that intel as their own on their own blogs and social media and as their own intellectual property.